our lovely mechanical box, and other updates

Last night, I rhapsodized on Twitter about how glorious it is to have the dishwasher in our new apartment wash dishes while Hanna and I snuggled down in bed to read. This morning, I woke up to this glorious meme, courtesy of our librarian friend Kate Bowers! Life is, indeed, good.

As the history of photo posts since mid-September attests, it has also been busy. In no particular order…

Geraldine, age six(ish), was at the dentist on Halloween and had to have two molars removed. Doing well, she — and by association Teazle — have been on vet-prescribed soft food diets for two weeks, plus liquid painkiller and mouthwash (just Gerry, not Teazle). We’ve been having adventures in oral syringes! She seems to be a bit less tetchy and cuddlier since the operation, so we hope she’s feeling better.

Teazle, age two, is experiencing her first autumn with access to “the out” (in the form of our back porch); she spends much of her time going out and returning with fallen leaves for us to admire. Or complaining that we have closed the window due to cold and cruelly blocked her way.

Hanna’s been crocheting lots, thanks to JP Knit ‘n Stitch‘s selection of Cascade Yarns. Her latest project is star scarves, which she makes out of handfuls of these guys.

Hanna and I met with our friend Natalie in mid-October for a marathon Boston Summer Seminar planning session, and are well on our way to planning an exciting program for the June 2015 attendees.

I’ve been blogging less here, but wrote two blog posts for the MHS on teen sexuality in the 1930s and trans-continental travel in the 1910s. Both were enjoyable little projects; my self-challenge is to focus on our 20th century collections, so often overlooked, and the results of that limitation can be quite gratifying.

While illness prevented us from traveling to the NECBS conference at Bates College (Lewiston, Me.) on Patriot’s Day weekend, Hanna posted her presentation online anyway and continues to explore historical memes in Irish nationalist autobiography in her “spare” time.

Hanna has also been enjoying her “ultimate power” of meal planning and preparation (while I run errands and load the mechanical box) which I ceded to her over the summer — a decision that has worked well for both of us! Most recently, she successfully test-drove the slow cooker we inherited from the previous tenant with mac and cheese.

As co-chairs of New England Archivists’ LGBTQ Issues Roundtable Hanna and I launched the new Queer!NEA WordPress site this fall and I have had the pleasure of working with our volunteer “Q5” series editor, Brendan Kieran, to develop a series posts profiling New England scholars and archivists working in the field of history of gender and sexuality. We will be cycling out of roundtable leadership in January and are currently looking for a candidate to take over the position of Chair for 2015-2016.

One reason I won’t be returning as Chair for LGBTQ Issues is that I have volunteered to serve as NEA’s first-everInclusion and Diversity Coordinator. I’m gonna do my best to effect small-scale yet concrete change, particularly when it comes to keeping diversity coupled to issues of structural inequality and social justice. I expect to screw up, and am already practicing in my head how to respond constructively and non-defensively.